Sunday, May 27, 2007

It's good to be king

Caution: schadenfreude alert.

Not nice, but some people deserve it and right now the Democrats in St. Paul and Washington have gottten a pretty good whipping.

Let's start close to home: as I suspected they would at the time, the DFL completely misunderstood the election results and assumed that they would have carte blanche to start raising taxes and building government ever bigger. You could almost hear them coming into St. Paul in January humming "Happy Days Are Here Again." What did they get out of this session? The term of art would be "bupkes." Gov. Pawlenty outflanked them and broke out his veto pen, esssentially stopping the Democrats cold by suggesting that an already planned 10% increase in the state budget was probably sufficient. Pawlenty easily won the argument, held firm and as a results stands stronger than ever, while Larry Pogemiller, Margaret Andersen Kelliher and the rest of the Flower Pot Gang (to borrow from Joe Soucheray) were left with their agenda wafting down Jackson Street.

Then there's America's favorite couple, Harry and Nancy. They have been bellowing, huffing and puffing that they have a mandate to stop the war in Iraq. They have been dithering over timetables and taking conference calls from George Soros, Kos and the rest of the gang in the "reality based community," yet somehow George W. Bush's veto pen stopped them cold. Meanwhile, as I also supsected would happen, familiarity with Harry and Nancy has bred contempt - while it is less reported, the current polling shows that the Democratic Congress has an approval rating of less than 30%, similar to that of the MOST HATED AND ABSOLUTELY WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THIS COUNTRY, GOD HE SUCKS, RIGHT KOS?!

While I have my suspicions that the D's are incapable of learning, there are a few things that they might try to understand.

Yes, the Republicans lost the last election cycle, but that doesn't automatically mean that the Democrats won the last election cycle. It was evident that there is widespread discontent with the war, but it's not necessarily because people believe it is lost, as Harry Reid has claimed. If you were able to dig a little deeper, you'd likely learn that many Americans are disgusted by the war because they believe we aren't doing everything we can to win it. If the Democrats had understood this, they might have came at it a little differently.

Taxes are still a big issue. If the government is problematic, which seems to be the view of many people in this country, it doesn't follow that the solution is giving the government more money and power over people's lives. Democrats still believe that a bigger government will improve people's lives, mainly because they are the ones who populate and perpetuate big government. There wasn't any mandate to enrich and add to the population of bureaucrats.

Just because many people decided they don't like George Bush, it never followed that they believe that the Democrats are somehow smarter. The Democratic Party hasn't really had any innovative ideas since the 1960s. About the only innovations they offer these days are really old ideas, like nationalizing health care or adding additional libertinism to the sexual arena. There was a sense that Bush and his administration needed a spanking, but that didn't mean that a bigger, more intrusive government was what people wanted.

So the Democrats are in control, but they don't have control. Meanwhile, Kos and the rest of his gang are fuming and making threats. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people, doncha think?

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

The democrats may have been reminded that the public doesn't like increase in taxes, but it's time that the Republicans, who for too many years have been spending the public's money like drunken sailers themselves, should listen as well. A 10% annual increase budget means that government spending will double every 7.2 years. Meanwhile most of us in the public sector are getting increases less than 10%. It can only mean one thing. More money for goverment and less money for the public. The increase amount may be tempered but the result is the same: death by a thousand cuts.

All true and a nice application of the "Rule of 72." But again, remember, politics is the art of the possible. At this point, with the D's in charge of the agenda at the legislature, cutting spending is impossible. Holding the line somewhat is better than nothing.